Ivye. The Church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul.

Ivye was founded in 1444 and, in general, repeated the historical path of many other towns in the region. Being at first a Lithuanian grand ducal court, it was subsequently transferred to private ownership. Over the centuries, Ivye has changed hands so often that almost all famous surnames from the Polish-Lithuanian nobility have been noted here: Zaberezinsky, Kishki, Glebovichi, Oginsky, Sapieha, Tyzengauz and others. The first owner, Peter Montygerdovich, founded a church in 1495, which in the 16th century became one of the bases of Arianism (or rather, Socinianism – one of the antitrinitarian heresies). After their defeat in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 1630s, the church and monastery were handed over to the Bernardines.

The Church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul is one of the main attractions of Ivye. Since its foundation in 1495, the church has been repeatedly completed and rebuilt, so the dating can be considered to be 1787, when it acquired a modern Baroque appearance. The monastery's two-storey building adjacent to the church was built in the first half of the XVII century.

The architecture of the church is a fusion of early and late (in the crowning part) Baroque. The building is a one-nave two-towered temple of the hall type. The nave under cylindrical arches ends with a pentagonal apse, which is decorated in the center with a flat niche and a lunette. The main facade of the church is divided by a cornice into a lower tier decorated with thin pilasters, and the upper one is a tower. The middle part of the facade is completed with a figured attic pediment; the tower is decorated with faceted domes. There are stepped buttresses at the corners of the main building and the apse, which gives the church stability and enhances the monumentality of its appearance.

In 2002, to the right of the church, local priests placed a greatly reduced copy of the famous Brazilian statue of Jesus Christ, which is why the town was jokingly called Ivier de Janeiro. I must say that there are so many Catholic parishioners in the city that the old church cannot accommodate all the faithful, and therefore has to work in two shifts.

The district center of Ivye is small, but it has preserved many architectural monuments. These are a wooden mosque, a synagogue, a watermill, civil buildings and the ancient church of Peter and Paul, which is the architectural dominant of the city. The church has been well preserved to our time. And besides the temple building itself, you will be interested in decorating the landscape around it.

The Church of Peter and Paul in Ivye has a long history. The first Catholic church was built in the 15th century by magnate Stanislav Kiska on a large hill in the city. And in 1631, the Mstislav voivode Nikolai Kishka built a Bernardine monastery next to the temple. The buildings were destroyed in the middle of the 17th century during the war between the Muscovite Kingdom and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Then the shrine is reborn.

The church was rebuilt in the 18th century. During the Russian Empire, the monastery was closed. In the Soviet years, the church always worked. The Catholic monastery is separated from the street by an earthen rampart, which had defensive significance.

The temple has Gothic and Baroque features. The building is three-nave with a two-towered facade. The towers are multi-tiered. The building is covered with a gable roof. There are 6 altars inside: the main one and 5 side ones. On the main altar you will see sculptures of Peter and Paul. The altar is brick, two-tiered.

The walls of the church were painted in the early 20th century. A 17th-century tiled stove has been preserved in the monastery building. Next to the temple on the right is a tall statue of Jesus Christ.